Our story
Ovenlark started in 2015 with a market stall, a borrowed convection oven and a brown butter cookie recipe Nell had been fiddling with for years.
How it started
Nell Hargreaves trained as a pastry chef and spent ten years in hotel and restaurant kitchens in Manchester and London before moving home to Sheffield. Sam Ibbotson was running facilities for a big hospital site at the time, which mostly meant arguing with contractors and walking a lot of corridors at night.
The idea came from those corridors. Sam kept noticing that once the canteen shut, night-shift staff had nothing to eat but whatever was in the vending machines: crisps, chocolate bars, the odd sad flapjack. Nell, meanwhile, was baking cookies for friends on her days off and couldn’t keep up.
In spring 2015 they took a pitch at a monthly makers’ market in town and sold 300 cookies before lunch. They went back the next month, and the one after. By the following spring they had a small unit in Kelham Island, a proper deck oven, and a name that came from Nell’s start time.
Why vending?
Sam never forgot the night shifts. In 2019 a co-working space on Ecclesall Road let us put a converted glass-front machine in their kitchen, filled with that morning’s cookies. Most days it was empty by two. A year later we had machines in a few offices, a university library and our first hospital staff room, and a van leaving the yard at 6am.
One rule hasn’t changed: nothing in an Ovenlark machine is more than 48 hours old, and anything older comes out. Most of what comes back goes to a community food share in the north of the city. The bakers eat the rest.
How we bake
Doughs are mixed the afternoon before and rested overnight in the walk-in, which is where the toffee flavour and the chewy middles come from. We brown all our own butter, buy stoneground flour from a family mill in North Yorkshire and free-range eggs from a farm on the edge of the Peak District, and chop the chocolate by hand rather than buying chips. The first trays are out just after five.
Everyone on the team is paid at least the Real Living Wage, including the part-time drivers and the Saturday staff.
Since 2015
- 2015
First stall at a city centre makers’ market. Three cookies on the menu. Sold out at twenty to twelve.
- 2016
Moved into Unit 3, Tinsmith Yard, with one deck oven and a mixer bought from a bakery in Doncaster that was closing down.
- 2017
Opened the shop at the front of the unit. Started supplying our first cafés.
- 2019
First vending machine, in a co-working kitchen on Ecclesall Road.
- 2020
The shop shut for a while, so we delivered cookie boxes to doorsteps across Sheffield instead, by bike and van.
- 2021
Machines in two hospital staff rooms, and our first electric van.
- 2023
Took on the unit next door for packing. Corporate gift orders had outgrown the shop floor.
- 2025
A new three-deck oven, the 40th machine, and a 24-hour machine by the yard gate.
Who’s in the bakehouse
Nell still writes every recipe and does the early bake three days a week. Sam looks after vending, the vans and the numbers. Callum runs the bakehouse and has strong views on butter temperature. Marta manages the shop and knows most of the regulars by their order. Priya looks after vending hosts and corporate accounts, so if you e-mail about a machine or a gift order, it’s probably her who replies.
Then there’s the crew of bakers, packers and drivers, most of whom started on a Saturday shift and stayed. We’re sometimes hiring; see careers.